


dead hearts are hurting

by a_sober_folly



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Classism, Gen, Other, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, canon-typical discrimination, first-person point of view, mentioned/implied incest, song from Xena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 20:26:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8815150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_sober_folly/pseuds/a_sober_folly
Summary: The Black sisters through a few stages of life.





	

_ I never dreamed that we’d be distanced by a hate _

Bellatrix and Andromeda, Andry and Bella, the two inseparables. Wherever Bellatrix was, Andromeda would be sure to be there, not two seconds behind, sometimes followed by me.

Bellatrix was the leader, the queen of our cousin band of five, or of seven, when our Rosier kin came. Bellatrix, Andromeda, myself, Evan, Sirius, Elodea, Regulus. Bella had ruled us with an iron fist, saving her smiles and laughs for Andry, her hands for me. Evan had been blustering, trying to use his age to say he was better than Sirius, while his half-sister would wince in the background, hiding behind Regulus.

We had had the rather obscure tradition of both a family name and a planned-destiny name for middle names, the latter to be shed upon womanhood. Druella Lilith, Elladora Helena, and Cassiopeia Eleanor were the names chosen for us. Lilith the first witch, who was scorned a demon, a free woman. Helena, the empress who destroyed nations with a kiss. Eleanor, who ruled kingdoms and played politics like knucklebones.

Sometimes sisters called each other by their destiny-names, and then by their first names to show maturity— _ Lilith, Helena, Eleanor _ . We did not. We called each other diminutives of our first names— _ Bella, Andry, Cissy _ , and fell on our twice-barreled middle names and storied surname and bloodline in ringing tones of  _ Bellatrix Druella Lilith, Andromeda Elladora Helena, Narcissa Cassiopeia Eleanor _ .

But we are not here to discuss naming customs, nor to speak of cousins who have little importance, nor to even hear of beloved younger sisters. Why are we here again? Ah, yes—

It was queer, it had been said, of Bellatrix and Andromeda’s closeness, of the twins themselves. They were near-identical in looks and intelligence, and it was expected for twins to grow close. However, those two had been. . .too close.

Too close? it might be asked. How can sisters be too close? That is a question easily responded to, with only a few images. Hands separated by a wall, reaching out, on the same exact section, hands splayed out to exactly identical angles. If not separated, they would be palm-to-palm.

Nonsense, you might say. A mere coincidence. They are magical and twins, it is to be expected some things can happen. How, then, of this image? Bellatrix isolating her sister, refusing her friends, Andromeda looking on as if her sister is the hero, stars in her eyes as Bellatrix is jealous of Andromeda’s friends and suitors.

Normal sister stuff, you can respond. Perhaps this will convince you, then—Bellatrix’s lips pressed to Andromeda’s, the brown-haired girl holding the black-haired girl too close, Bellatrix slipping her hand under Andromeda’s skirts, as Andromeda’s hand slid down the line of Bellatrix’s back—

Andromeda breaking away from the kiss, and look, they’re older now, with fully fleshed-out forms and mature faces, Andromeda cradling her stomach and Bellatrix howling, sending jinx after hex after curse, and an Unforgivable or six—

Andromeda with blood between her thighs, Andromeda a year or two older, a wedding ring on her finger and worry lines on her face, a hand on a swollen belly, now holding a squalling baby with calico hair and naming her Nymphadora Vulpecula  _ Bellatrix. _

This is not to claim they were in love with each other— only they can tell the truth of that, pluck out the romantic from the sisterly relationship, compare their feelings for the favored sister to their feelings for me. Even I do not know if they loved each other as lovers, wished they could, saw the other as an extension of themselves, or if they acted on their own narcissism.

* * *

_ That all the trust we had would go. _

If Bellatrix had blood on her robes from a night with friends, Andromeda would easily gulp down the lie about one of them falling. If Andromeda’s lips were kiss-swollen and there were round bruises under her robes, Bellatrix would believe that Andromeda was not hiding a lover.

(not for true. but they would tell themselves they would, so sure the other would not be able to lie.)

They trusted each other—deeply, as loved sisters and best friends do. The Twins, they were sometimes called, Pollux and Castor thrust into the bodies of women and sharing half-immortality. The sons of a dead god who gave up immortality so they could be together as long as their lifespans lasted.

(half-blood children. they lived as Squibs together. or, pollux rose up castor’s corpse into a seeming, and his magic burnt out. when castor went after a child as his body rotted, pollux killed him again and left him dead, then killed himself.)

When I was young, and all our names were still Black, the splits began to happen, the cracks.

“Don’t tell Mother,” Bella might say, coming back late. A flash of guilt across her face, and she would amend herself. “Tell Andry I was finding her a gift for our birthday. I’ve been in Diagon the whole time, you’ve seen me when you were with your little friends.”

I wouldn’t understand, but I would do as I was told. Bella was four years my superior, Black as our mercurial father, and intimidating as our Rosier mother. It had never crossed my mind to question why Bella felt as if she couldn’t tell her beloved twin about an outing I knew nothing about.

“Don’t tell Bella,” Andry might say, when I saw her tossing a letter into the fireplace. Curiosity got the best of me then, and when I squirmed to free the burning letter, a burst of flame leapt up, devouring it. I looked at her, but her face was smooth and arrogant, her wand not in her hand.

“It’s nothing, Cissy. There’s a half-blood girl who thinks we’re friends. Bella despises her, that’s all.” My sister draped one leg over the other. “It’ll be our little secret, won’t it?”

This was not by any means damning—it might have been Bellatrix felt shameful that she missed a family supper, or that Andromeda was truly disdainful of a social climbing sycophant. Yet lie they did, and use me to do it. This cowardly notion was their undoing. Had they told each other themselves, they would have told themselves they believed their twin, and locked their doubts and insecurities away. By using me, doubts festered and grew. Their words they would believe, but not my own.

Until—

“I’ll be missing our birthday,” Bella had announced one day the next year. “I have plans, ones I simply couldn’t leave. Even Mother and Father would agree. Don’t fret, I’ll bring glory to our name.” She’d leaned down towards Andry, caressed the line of a cheekbone with a finger. Her head was tilted down, her hair covering their faces. I could not see their expressions, but I knew they were mere inches from each other. I’d felt uneasy, as I always had when they were like that.

Relief had leapt into Andry’s eyes for a blinding second. This I could not see, but I have heard.  Bella had stepped back, her face an open book of hurt and anger.

“Well,” Bella had said, making an effort to pull herself together, “if that is how you feel, Andromeda—”

“It isn’t,” my once sister had hastened to say. “It’s that I haven’t a gift for you, and now I can search for one for longer.”

“You know I don’t need one.  _ You’re  _ my gift, and all I need, sister.” Bella often spoke those words softly, passionately, as if she was confessing a great secret. Not this time. In hurt, in anger, in betrayal and silent pleading. “Andromeda?”

Andry met Bella’s eyes, no trace of guilt or shame in her spine, eyes calm and steady. “I forgot to buy you something, Bella. To get you something would be my gift as well, sister.”

A heartbeat had passed, then another. Our baby cousins thumped and jumped about over our heads. Andromeda took Bella’s hand, clasping it tightly between her own.

Bored—for I was now fifteen to their near-nineteen, and trying to catch a suitor of my own— I bent over a scroll of parchment, attempting to ensnare Thorfinn Rowle with my writing. Whispered words I couldn’t catch were at the edge of my hearing, snatches of conversation, so low I could not even distinguish between their voices.

“You know I love you. . .”  
“You must understand. . .”  
“. . . time for. . . I have. . . pureblood. . .”  
“I think. . . important. . . upsetting. . .”  
“. . .you’ve. . .rose. . . kiss. . .”  
“Not my fault. . .”

I’d left at that time, distracted from my poor efforts at seduction by attempting to listen. I’d been sure that they would work it out themselves, but as soon as I’d left, Bella had snatched her hand away, and attempted to peer into Andry’s mind, only to be turned away by Occlumenic barriers. Two disasters had happened then—Bella had attempted to force out the truth, and Andry was hiding something.

The sound of the slap travelled through the house. To this day, I still don’t know who had slapped who—Andromeda, for the unwanted invasion of her mind? Bellatrix, for being kept out of a thing she was always allowed in?

We should have known then. We ought to have guessed Andromeda’s great secret, simple as it was. But we’d refused to think, refused to comprehend, refused to consider that. She was our sister, a scion of the House of Black, Bella’s beloved twin, and my adored older sister.

Two years later, she broke our trust forever when she got herself pregnant, and was unaware if the father was Rabastan Lestrange, or the Mudblood Tonks. She married the Mudblood, spent the night with Rabastan, wrote Bella a letter and handed it to her. Bella ran out the women who had been our sister, and burned her name off the family tree herself.

Andromeda lost her child of uncertain fatherhood. It was for the best, we all agreed. Rabastan should not have to suffer, not knowing if his child was being raised by a mudblood and blood traitor, and not suffer the indignity of tests to find out if the whore’s babe was his.

(castor had fallen. pollux did not move to help him.)

* * *

_ How could I hate you?  _

We turned our backs on her. She betrayed us, we said, and I married Lucius Malfoy to quench the waters of Her scandal. We grew to love each other eventually, but our only child was formed from duty. We learned to love each other only then.

Bella sank, deeper and deeper into hate, into uncertainty. Bella rose, higher and higher in the ranks of my husband’s friends. Whenever I saw her, some sour scent lingered around her, and smoke always seemed to be caught in her hair. She was giddier, she was more furious. Her moods, always quicksilver, changed with alarming rapidness, and she cared less and less about others, about family. She closed herself off, sank deeper into herself, and I don’t believe she ever recovered from the betrayal of one who had been her sister, her face, her dearest twin, her possible-lover, the one she had trusted the most.

I didn’t learn that She had come seeking reconciliation, freak child in arms until well over two decades later. I did not know Bella had wept and raged, pleaded and begged, and at last drove her off. I do not know if they kissed, I don’t know if they touched. Andromeda remained silent on that as she told me, her face curiously and devastatingly still. But she and her child left alive and unscarred at that time, and Bella never mentioned the meeting. 

* * *

_ How could it come to pass, this awful twist of fate? (How could I hurt you?) This madness can’t be so. (I can’t believe it.) _

When our former cousin of the Blacks ran off, she begged to chase him down, to bring him back in pieces. What would others think of us? she argued. We lost first a girl, and then our former heir. We would be the laughingstock of the sacred twenty-eight.

Cooler heads prevailed, if only for our reputation. 

He had always been a disgrace, at the very least. That was something we could not say for Her. He had already been a Gryffindor—had not we always thought this would happen? He was friends with blood traitors, was friends with a Mudblood, even. This new scandal hurt us, but our foundations had already been shaken. Even Cedrella had married a pureblood, and Phineas had not sullied the bloodline. It had been a century since a Black ran away with a Mudblood, and she had been quickly forgotten, besides never bearing live young. 

Really, His was not so awful as Hers. He ran to a home of blood traitors, and she fled to a house of filth. We let Her live, and Her implications were greater than His, His only being greater in the small term. We have lost sons before, and He had never been a very good one, at that.

* * *

_ I never dreamed that barriers would rise. (Or that I’d ever see the stranger in your eyes) _

I saw Her once, Her and Her bratling. She’d gained some weight, I had noticed cruelly. Her robes were evidently mended and out-of-style, Her hair unfashionably falling out of the pins She had stuffed it into. Her half-breed issue amused itself by changing the shape of its face, and the length of its hair. She had spawned a Metamorphmagus, I had realized with growing disgust. 

She had laughed, then, called to Her child, and it had ran to Her. She’d picked it up, swung it around, gave it a kiss on the head. 

That wasn’t how we were raised. That was not what we knew, or something we had felt. She had  _ softened _ , I had thought with scorn. She had softened up after She fell, and now She was no different than a Mudblood mother and her mewling beastling. I didn’t recognize that, the light that had shone in Her eyes, no more than I recognized Her nibbled nails, the new lines around Her eyes and mouth that had not been there a handful of years ago.

She looked lighter. She looked happier. I didn’t know her.

Bella didn’t know that I saw Her. Bella was growing deeper and deeper into her great Cause that my Lucius was a part of, the Cause that would return wizardkind to our rightful place. She was more a Nundu than ever, pacing and dangerous. 

“Cissy,” she said once, “There’s a Mudblood nearby, who doesn’t know how to shut up her brat. Shall I silence her for you?”

I’d heard the pronunciation, the lack of emphasis. Kill, not Silence. Take care of, a woman who lived in the next neighborhood over, because sometimes her child was loud. Because the sound might be irritating sometime. 

“I won’t be here much longer, Cissy,” she’d snapped. “Why I even bother asking you, Merlin knows why. I’m needed for something else.” I’d near dropped my wand at that, and she’d jerked her head in response. “I’m busy, Narcissa. Don’t disgrace me.”

I had looked at her, truly looked at her, this sister I had worshipped, and found nothing in those familiar gray eyes. There was no anger, no love, no fury, no hurt. Mother would have been proud, and the sister I’d grown up with would have despaired at Mother’s pleasure.

“Do as you will,” I’d responded. “You think I care if a Mudblood lives or dies?”

 

* * *

_ Our hearts were hurting both the same (The hurt was tearing up our souls) the fury in us made us blind (we could not see beyond the pain)  _

Bella had left me— left me, left me, sent herself off to Azkaban, and nearly packaged my husband off there as well! Surely, I had thought, She would see the wisdom of reconciliation, of leaving what She called husband. She had been a Slytherin, She must have seen we might have even taken in Her spawn— hidden it in whispers of doubtful paternity, of course, kept it off our family tree, but She would have been welcomed in like He would be if He was ever allowed home from Azkaban.

Regulus, the baby of all of us, was dead, and the eldest and leader of all of us was never to return. Father was a broken man, Mother disgraced, Father’s former brother dead, Aunt Walburga slowly dying, and Uncle Orion was dead. The line therefore went straight to me, as the remaining Black who would inherit all. The other traitor would stay in Azkaban for the rest of His days. Father would not dare disown me if I took Her in; I was all they had left. If She repented, She would be accepted. All stars fell eventually, but new stars are created from their ashes. Such as the tales went. Helen of far-off Troy ran away with Paris, and then went back to her husband Menelaus as Troy burned. It was surely not too much to assume She would do the same.

I sent Her an impersonal card, requesting her presence at Malfoy Manor to discuss Her appearing the funeral of our aunt, who was sure to pass in a few years. She sent back a picture of Herself, Her spawn, and the Mudblood she called husband. She had chosen to keep to Her betrayal, and I burned Her picture. Never, I swore, would I ever contact Her again.  
  


* * *

_ If we could turn again to love (if we could heal these open wounds) we’ll leave this hatred far behind (so not a trace of hate remains!) _

Mother died first, and Father followed within a few weeks. 

We had known— _ I  _ had known, Lucius had known, Draco had been told, and the  _ Prophet  _ has been informed. For all that the Black name had been dragged through the mud with Bella and Him in Azkaban, Her disownment, and Regulus’s suspicious death, we had still been a force to be reckoned with. I had even made it a point to bribe officials to get the news to Bella in Azkaban of our parents passing, and requested for her to make an appearance— a head in a fire with her body chained up, a charmed mirror. My efforts were soundly turned down, and it had cost more gold to have their denials off-record. 

I had never thought She would show up, tugging Her bratling. It was older now, surely past age, and bore a sulky look on Its face. She had made It dress pretty, and It was tugging at Its robes, staying still in a form I supposed must be some type of natural, if Metamorphmagi had a form they could call natural. It resembled Her and Bellatrix quite a bit, but the posture and expressions were pure filth, something Mother would have had the house-elfs discipline us for.

“You’re not welcome,” I told her coldly. “This funeral is for family and allies only.”

She had met my eyes squarely. “Am I not?” 

“Neither,” I responded. “You’re nothing, you’re filth. Mother never recovered after you, and she’s in her grave now. Father followed her.”

Pain flashed in Her eyes, covered up by a calm wall of blankness. “My condolences, yet I would make the same choice.” Her spawn figeted, began to say something, and decided to keep quiet.

How dared she? I’d wondered. How dare she, come to mourn my parents like they meant something to her, bring her freak, and say she would do it all again. “Father would have killed himself rather than see you here,” I said. “Mother would have done so as well. If you truly wish to respect them after you disgraced them, you would leave. They wouldn’t want their names tainted any more by you.”

She gave a sneer. “I would think—"

“Mum.” It wrapped slender hands around Her wrist. “Let’s go. We’ll make a scene, and I have to be at work soon. They’re—" It gave a disdainful look at the benches, my husband, my son, the elegant coffins, at me. “They’re not worth it.”

The callous dismissal of all took me aback. “Surely—"

“Yes, you’re right.” She turned, let her daughter lead her out. “After all, if they’d be so disgraced by our presence, as their only daughter who never had my name touched by rumors, I might as well keep shame off their name that way.” She turned, Her eyes so like Bella’s catching mine. “Don’t you think so,  _ Cissy _ ?”

 

* * *

_ We'll overcome our damaged past and we'll grow stronger side by side to stand together through the storms. We're safe ‘cause love will be our guide! _

After the Dark Lord fell, I tried again. Sirius was dead, Bellatrix was dead. Our parents were dead, and Lucius, Draco, and I had been all but prisoners in our home, outlets for the Dark Lord’s anger. I sent a letter to my last remaining family, begging reconciliation, begging pardons for past wrongs, and sending regards for the loss of her Mudblood husband and daughter, swearing I would raise statues for them.

When she did not answer, I ferreted out her address, and went to visit her. When she opened the door, I near-didn’t recognize her. Her hair was wild, greasy, and unwashed. The stench of body odor was thick around her. Instinctively, I took a step back. “An—Andromeda,” I said, barely realizing it was the first time I had spoken, much less thought her name in over twenty-five years. “You look unwell.”

She said nothing, and I could hear the cries of an infant in the background. “An— Andromeda,” I tried. “I must apologize for—"

Fury entered her eyes, and I took a step back at the sudden resemblance. Bellatrix looked just that way when she was about to punish us. “Out,” was all she said. “Damn you, out.”

“I want to make amends,” I said. “I’ve heard that— that your daughter has—"

“You  _ dare  _ speak of her!” Her wand was in her hand, and then against my neck. “Out,” she said, breathing heavily. “Get out of my property, leave my life, and never contact me again. If you do, I will kill you. Do you understand? I hate enough, and I  _ mean  _ it.”  
  
I turned on my heel, and fled.

**Author's Note:**

> so i'm a huge Xenite, and I felt like Dead Hearts are Hurting would be a great song for a backdrop.


End file.
